Bitcoin mining efficiency and Botnets

Cathal Garvey cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me
Tue Oct 15 03:03:41 PDT 2013


> careful, but even so, does this mean that Bitcoin miners who want to
> make a profit are going to need to dump general-purpose machines in
> favor of specialized hardware
> such as FPGAs or ASICs?  Or is buying a high-end GPU still good
> enough?

People focus too much on the "profit" miners make, and not the
verifiability and anarchism they are supposed to be providing to the
bitcoin network. In that regard, arguably the most important, bitcoin
has already failed entirely.

Of course, bitcoin is a startlingly obvious example of code with
politics baked in, and you're seeing the natural play-out of that
political philosophy in bitcoin with little artificial interruption;
corruption, oligarchy, and the creation of a false market controlled by
monopolistic cartels which fluctuates in price only when it is
profitable to the cartels for it to do so.

Much of this is beyond the control of an algorithm. The wealthy will
always be able to out-mine the poor if it's a straight battle of
who-buys-more-hardware. However, bitcoin has fallen so quickly because
it's created a threshold cut-off for those below a certain income
bracket, so that those who are not already reasonably wealthy can now
not hope to compete in mining operations.

Litecoin was doing better while it was CPU-bound, because the cost of
setting up a mining operation on CPUs is more linear; the poor get poor
hardware, the rich get rich hardware, but the relationship isn't as
exponential as it is with CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC. Now that Litecoin's
basically GPU only, it's also a little worse than it started, but
there's no evidence at this point that it'll go FPGA.

However, I do think we need an even Lite-r 'coin, running a hash that
won't even scale in GPUs. Keep this to the unit of hardware that's most
scalar in quality/price and most accessible to the people who most need
to trust a currency; the people spending the greatest proportion of
their income in daily life, the middle and lower income fraction. I'm
interested in the outcome of the password hashing competition to see if
this yields something 'coinable.

My ideal hash for a 'coin, unrealistic as it is even in theory, is a
hash that practically defines the instruction set and architecture of a
prototypical CPU, so that translating it into specialised hardware is
either impossible, or merely creates a more efficient CPU, which is
better marketed as a CPU than a mining rig. In other words, the
state-of-the-art in CPUs is exactly the state-of-the-art in CPUcoin
mining. :)
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